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What we learned about accessibility by scanning more than 2 million federal .gov web pages
The Innovation Technology Innovation Foundation recently published an accessibility analysis of federal .gov websites, but this just scratches the surface of the need for a holistic, scalable approach to digital government accessibility.
ITIF scanned 72 federal websites — plus their second- and third-most popular pages — for issues that violated WCAG 2.0 Level A or Level AA standards. The assessment tool used was the axe DevTools browser extension, a single-page automated scan.
This research is useful in highlighting the need for improvement, but we expanded on the scope of the scan to get a deeper understanding of the broader accessibility challenges federal .gov websites face.
What we scanned
Curious about how the federal government fares beyond just the home and three most popular pages, we performed domain-wide scans on:
- 100+ federal .gov top-level and subdomains
- Totaling more than 2 million pages
We tested against 2.1 AA requirements, the current best practice for digital accessibility standards. The open source tools we used were Domain Accessibility Audit (to crawl the pages) and axe (to perform [...]